Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Well it arrived today after a long discovery and shipping journey. Reliance Hand Relief Press - 21" x 27" platen.

It weighs about 1600lbs and was built over 100years ago. I have to get the bed rolling a little quicker as its clogged with many years of grease and dirt. The bed has some rust spots from not being used in a long while . But once its cleaned up I'll be doing some larger woodcuts and hopefully this weight of press will help with the "inprint" in to the paper that I was missing in my hand barren prints.

I'm very excited to get this baby up and running. I'll try to post some stills of the clean up process and eventually some video of it in action. So stay posted.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

So for quite some time now, maybe a few years, I have not
been very excited about doing “digital art”, instead opting to continue with a
more hands on medium, wood cuts. I guess I had been disillusioned with whole
digital painting process and how abstract it felt for me. For many reasons, to numerous
to list here, I did not feel connected to the images I produced on the computer
and so was not inspired.

That being said, due to my history and work, I did keep my
eye on the industry, software and followed some artists work with interest.

One such artist that has inspired me!

Matt Hubel : http://www.matthubel.com/
He has been relentless in his pursuit of
“bettering” his skills sets and process. I worked with Matt for almost a year
at a video game company and it’s been a real pleasure to see his skills and
process grow. A couple of days ago he released a simple youtube capture of one
of his drawings that made me look at the medium with fresh eyes again.

I’m not sure why but after watching this video I actually
wanted to sit down, open up photoshop and paint on the computer again. That has
not happened in a long time. I found a
cool photo of the Onion Knight from Game of Thrones and used that as my
reference for a grey scale study. It’s been a while and I need to set up more
than one brush so as to get some more diverse texture but I actually had fun
and whilst I’m not proud of the image per say I am “inspired” again to do a
little more digital painting again.